Business Management and Strategy ISSN 2157-6068 2013, Vol. 4, No. 2 www.macrothink.org/bms 83 processes and performance. The company already included a summary of the workshops findings in its 2011 sustainability report. Lastly, BP has used a specialist market intelligence search engine to identify trends in public and stakeholder opinion about BP and to evaluate their potential to affect the company’s reputation. A meta-analysis was also provided of all the recent stakeholder research and dialogue BP had carried out or commissioned. 5. Discussion The analysis of BP crisis management of the Deepwater Horizon disaster shows mainly that there are many failures at managing the three phases of a crisis. Through the analysis of BP environmental strategy before the crisis occurs, it turned out that it was just a Greenwashing, that safety was not a priority to BP, to the point that it has never envisaged an emergency plan, was not sufficiently prepared to such a catastrophic situation and did not make enough efforts to avoid crises Worse still, only few days before the accident, BP neglected serious warnings and even cut corners on Deepwater Horizon safety. When the crisis occurred, the BP initial response totally failed. The company was too slow, tried to blame third parties and abdicated responsibility while it would express concern for the victims and take its responsibility and reassure all the stakeholders. BP even aggravated its reputation damages when it censured or delayed the information flow and refused to cooperate with the media. Even after the crisis, BP continues to conceal important information about the real damages of the spill oil, disseminated only information that can contribute to repair its reputation and continues to blame its partners. Besides, through the succession of accidents and scandals, it seems that BP has never believed that it could learn from such crisis. In the light of this case study, at least four lessons can be learnt. The first lesson refers to the strong connection between CSR and crisis management. This BP case study is in fact a strong reminder that companies should nowadays sincerely embrace the principles of social and environmental responsibility and have to consider themselves responsible for more than bottom-line results. Crisis management literature showed that in time of crisis, CSR acted as a company insurance policy (Klein and Dawar, 2004) and that the company’s history has an instrumental effect on how it will be perceived when a crisis occurs (Maresh and Williams, 2010). It is noteworthy that prior to the crisis, BP had tried to buildup an image of legitimacy and trustworthiness, but this does not help it during the disaster. This is due mainly to the lack of credibility of its discourse. This consequently demonstrates the dangers of the greenwashing strategy and the propagandist discourse. Carrying a continuous speech of socially responsible company increases, apparently, stakeholders expectations in times of crisis, and this in turn generates more pressures on it.
